From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Mon Dec 01 2003 - 01:36:50 GMT
Mark, Paul and all:
Mark said:
Homer was not one man - Homer is the merging of a whole era of poems and
creativity stretching back into prehistory.
dmb says:
I think its more like Homer was one man, but he didn't invent all those
stories himself, but rather put down in writing a vast inheritance. The same
kind of thing happened with the earliest books of the bible. It contains
stories that are far older than the bible itself. And one of the reasons
that the traditional stories rhymed or were otherwise musical is that such
an arrangement serves as a neunomic device, a tool to help the memory.
Mark said:
Writing requires the manipulation of a symbolic language, and that is an
intellectual process is it not? ....Language is the manipulation of symbols
and therefore an intellectual development?
Paul replied:
Yes, I think that when language is manipulating symbols into patterns of
thought it is intellectual; when it is an extension of ritual and custom
it is social. ....I've read a theory of the origin of language that
suggests speaking started out as singing which ties in with Pirsig's
link with ritual dancing and accounts for the presence of "poetic" meter
in early writing.
dmb adds:
Exactly. When Pirsig says that "the first intellectual truths could have
been derived" from myths, rituals and cosmology stories it becomes quite
clear that language preceeds intellect and that language was very much a
part of the social level. Surely, there can be no myths or stories without
language. To put it even more simply, he says, "principles emerge from
ritual". With all that in mind, I think its easy to see that "ideas emerge
from language". To bring it into the realm of common experience, I think we
can see what pre-intellectual language must have been like when we look at
the way young children use language. My three year old boy, for example, has
hundreds of words in his vocabulary, but he takes them all quite literally.
The other day I tried to explain how "blue" was another word for sad and
"the blues" is a kind of sad music. He was happy to take my word for it, but
I could tell that he didn't really get it. He's not yet able to use language
in that kind of symbolic and abstract way. He's had a few "slivers" of wood
in his hands, but when I complained that there was only a sliver of soap
left, he insisted that soap is not a sliver because its not made of wood. He
doesn't understand the word as a concept, only as a specific object. And
this level of language use, the level of a three year old boy, is probably
not too far from what the Neanderthals were doing.
I don't have a problem with "symbolic manipulation" as a definition of
intellect per se. The problem is that way too may interpreters have come to
the same conclusion that mark has, that language in and of itself is
symbolic and therefore intellectual. Someone even suggested that the Lascaux
cave paintings are symbolic and therefore intellectual. But surely these
kinds of interpretations don't work. It destroys one of the most critical
distinctions in the MOQ and turns the 4th moral code into such a blur that
it becomes quite useless.
Thanks,
dmb
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Dec 01 2003 - 01:38:42 GMT